Cash out: cash taken out at a point-of-sale terminal, with or without a purchase.
Debit card: card used for debiting money directly from a bank account. Also commonly referred to as eftpos, cash, or ATM card.
Debit transactions: where the purchaser uses the cheque or savings buttons on the point-of-sale terminal.
Eftpos: electronic funds transfer at point of sale.
Card-not-present transactions: purchases made using a credit card, via telephone, mail order, Internet, or credit card direct debit where the card is not present for the transaction.

Data calculation/treatment

Seasonally adjusted series
Statistics NZ use the X-13ARIMA-SEATS package to produce the seasonally adjusted estimates and trend estimates for the three series: total, retail, and core retail ECT. Seasonal adjustment aims to eliminate the impact of regular seasonal events (such as annual cycles in agricultural production, winter, or annual holidays) on time series. This makes the data for adjacent months more comparable. There is no specific adjustment made for leap years in these series.
All seasonally adjusted figures are subject to revision each month. This enables the seasonal component to be better estimated and removed from the series.

Limitations of the data

One of the respondent companies includes cash-out data, but the other excludes them.
One of the respondent companies includes manual, voucher-based credit card transactions, but the other excludes them.

Inclusions

The ECT series includes:
- all debit, credit, and charge card transactions with New Zealand-based merchants
- card-present transactions at the point of sale, whether authorised by PIN or signature
- card-not-present transactions (eg payments of invoices; mail order, telephone, and Internet sales via credit card; or direct debit from credit cards) where the card is not presented directly at a point-of-sale terminal
- GST.

Dataset originally released on:

July 10, 2018

Purpose of collection

Electronic Card Transactions (ECT) is a monthly series that covers all debit, credit, and charge card transactions with New Zealand-based merchants. This information can be used as an indicator of the change in the level of consumption expenditure and economic activity in general.